It's funny because he has more or less said this, just not in that way. It was fun listening to him stuttering in the podcast while trying to explain this view of his. I like to think that Joel was just staring at him incredulously the whole time.
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XMLbogJul 7 '09 at 16:57

2

Then why is an attractive, successful person like me allowed on SO? Oh, no! Did I just out myself? Correction: I am a hideous, parent's-basement-dwelling troll. Please do not ban me.
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Hilarious Comedy PestoJul 7 '09 at 16:58

@Rich I never salute people, it's a voluntary show of disrespect that no one notices. But, I've decided to edit all your posts to include "Hi, Thanks" and "Love -Rich" at the bottom.
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devinbJul 7 '09 at 17:43

necessary? no, we don't NEED much of any of this. do you think it's inconceivable that these translations could be done programmaticly?
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expiredninjaApr 28 '12 at 9:43

@expiredninja: Yes, with current technology I find it inconceivable that program-based translations would suffice for technical questions and answers with a reliability I'd accept. I've read enough questions that I couldn't really understand, written by humans who could use machine translation if they wanted to.
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David ThornleyMay 1 '12 at 17:28

Because I'm useful only for questions asked in English, and for giving answers in English. If we all have a common language, we can all participate in our areas of expertise, and we can come to reasonably agreed answers. If this were a multilingual site, then we'd reduce it to a batch of overlapping sub-communities, and we would have a danger of having significantly different answers in (say) German and Japanese.

By having one official language, we have one community, with sub-communities based on subject area rather than language, and we can consolidate duplicates to some extent. The benefits are real. If we have only one language, it obviously should be English. (This isn't true for all conceivable subjects, but it is for software.)

I'd have absolutely no objections to having easily available translations of questions and answers, since there's a lot of people using this site that have problems with English (and I really, really hope that all of those people are not primary English speakers). Really, I have nothing against Swedish speakers, I just can't communicate with them except in English, and so I can't cooperate with them except in English. (Yes, I'm a US citizen.)